Carl Sagan's Words of Wisdom...

Via Paul H.



Science's “Great Communicator” is much missed in these parts...

Seriously Geeky...

What if you wanted to run Linux right in your web browser?  How would you do it?

Well, of course what you would do is to write a JavaScript emulation of an x86 processor and its peripherals, then port Linux to that.  Or at least that's what Fabrice Bellard did, just for fun.  Be sure to check out the technical notes.

Awesome, dude!

Map of the Universe...

Extra gigantic sized!

I Need One of These!

Very clever – and beautiful – demonstration of the relationship between a pendulum's length and it's oscillation period...

Quote of the Day...

By Bert Prelutsky in the Los Angeles Times:

Frankly, I don't know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I'm not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we're number one. There's no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on 'Macbeth'. The four of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don't know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.

Wish I'd written that!

Audio Illusion...

Known as the “McGurk Effect”, this is simply awesome.  I must have watched this 10 times and I can still hardly believe it.  Via reader Simon M.:

Replace the Monkeys...

Political advice worth considering, via my mom:

If you start with a cage containing five monkeys and inside the cage, hang a banana on a string from the top and then you place a set of stairs under the banana, before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray all the other monkeys with cold water. After a while another monkey makes an attempt with same result ... all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put the cold water away.

Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, all of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys, replacing it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment... with enthusiasm.

Then, replace a third original monkey with a new one, followed by a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

Finally, having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the banana.

Why, you ask? Because in their minds... that is the way it has always been!

This, my friends, is how Congress operates... and is why, from time to time, all of the monkeys need to be REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME IN 2012.

Shadow Government Statistics...

Here's a fascinating site whose objective is to undo all the obfuscation the U.S. government has applied to its financial statistics.  Key indicators (such as the unemployment rate), when they move in a politically unsavory direction, tend to be “reformulated” to paint a rosier picture.  One side effect of this is that it's almost impossible for us to compare statistics today to past statistics.  This site computes today's statistics the same way they used to be computed, to give us a consistent picture.  For example, if the unemployment rate were computed today the same way it was in 1990, it would be about 16%, not the 9% being reported today...

Another Climate Scientist Turns Skeptic...

An excerpt from an article by David Evans:

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

Now go read the whole thing!

Tenerife...

Beautiful.  Just beautiful.  Via APOD...

Optical Illusion of the Year...

The colors on the dots below are changing the entire time the video is playing, but when the wheel starts jogging, they appear to stop.  Awesome!

The Correct Way to Arrest a Terrorist...

I want those cops on my side!

Won't Be Long Now...

The Decorah eagles are close to fledging.  All three of the chicks made it this far...

Newspaper Front Pages...

If you've ever been curious what newspapers in some faraway place look like, this site is for you.  They have hundreds of newspaper front pages, daily.  There's a world map, and you just drag it around until you see the place you want, click, and voila: today's front page shows up.  Cool!

360° Helicopter Cockpit...

Fascinating.  Via reader Dr. Simi L...

Sombrero Galaxy...

AKA M104, and home of a large black hole.  When I was a kid, the best photos of M104 came from places like the Palomar telescope, and they were fuzzy, grainy, black-and-white images with a tiny fraction of the detail of this one.  I remember poring over those early images, fascinated, and wishing I could see something like that from a backyard telescope.  Now look what we can see, from our comfortable chairs!  From APOD, of course...

Human Regeneration?

As Glenn Reynolds would say, faster please...

Kissinger, Now and Then...

I just finished reading this adaptation from Henry Kissinger's upcoming book, On China.  I have several independent reactions to it, but to understand them, you'll need a bit of context. 

Kissinger has had a huge and quite direct impact on my life.  I was in the U.S. Navy from '71 through '77, which includes the tail end of the Vietnam War, Nixon's famous visit to China, and Nixon's ignomious resignation.  The photo at right is from '76, and that visage is how I remember him.  Kissinger played an important role in all three of these events, but to me personally the most important role of his was in the “peace negotiations” with the North Vietnamese.

Probably more than any other event in my youth, this awakened my interest in politics and history.  Contemporaneously, very little was publicized about the inner workings of those negotiations; it took decades for it all to leak out.  My image of Kissinger is of an extremely bright, motivated, and sincere man – but capable of arrogance and ruthlessness even on large issues that affect millions of people.  His advocacy of Realpolitik I found profoundly un-American.  He frightened me when he was in power.

One reaction I had to reading the adaptation is that it reads a bit like an insider's historical account, and even if only for that reason I will read the book.  I don't know enough about modern China to assess his thoughts about it. 

Another reaction I had is a superficial one: to his contemporaneous photograph.  I haven't seen a photo of him for quite some time, so I was surprised and shocked by how much he has aged.  In the '70s, he was often seen with a beautiful woman on his arm, generally much younger than he.  His most famous quote (“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”) seemed quite consistent with his public persona.  He's now nearly 90 years old, so I really shouldn't have been surprised by the photo.  But I was.

The last reaction I had was to be a bit surprised at myself, mainly for not having thought about Dr. Henry Kissinger for quite a long time.  In the '70s and '80s, he and Zbigniew Brzezinski were frequent targets of my reading and thinking.  Other than as historical figures (!), neither has been top-of-mind for many years. 

Power and influence are fleeting things, usually...

A Recipe for Happiness...

Start with a stale crust of Dudley's Rosemary & Olive Oil bread.  Rip it into small pieces.  Warm a few tablespoons of milk in the microwave and soak the bread chunks in it.  Sprinkle a little shredded Parmesan cheese on it.  Stir in a tablespoon of melted butter.  Finely dice a slice of ham and mix it in.


Then put the bowl down on the floor for your old girl dog friend (in my case, Lea, our 15 year old field spaniel).  I guarantee you'll be a happier person after you watch your dog's delight and grunts of sheer doggie ecstasy.


It's so easy to make a dog happy...

Router Blues...

Recently the router (a 10 year old Cisco 806) that connected us to the Intertubes started having intermittent problems.  The symptoms were really quite annoying: it would work just fine for some period between 30 seconds and a week, then suddenly conk out completely.  To “fix” it, we had to power it down, wait a minute or so, then power it back up.

That annoyance has been removed.  I've replaced the venerable Cisco 806 with a Buffalo Technology model WZR-HP-G300NH (at right, click to enlarge), flashed with DD-WRT (open source router software).  This single $80 router replaces not only my malfunctioning Cisco 806, but also a separate Cisco wireless router.

So what was it like to replace that Cisco 806? 

Installing the Cisco in the first place is something I remember well.  I was already reasonably familiar with the arcane Cisco IOS configuration files before I started that job.  Even so, to set up the 806 I had to learn a few new things.  It ended up consuming an entire weekend, and involved many failed attempts before I finally got us up and running on the Intertubes.  For months afterwards, I tweaked one thing and another until I finally got it all working.

Now contrast the more recent experience of bringing up the Buffalo Technology router.  There were just two steps.  First, I downloaded the latest DD-WRT version and flashed the router with it.  Elapsed time: about 10 minutes.  Then I used the built-in web pages to explore and configure the router.  Elapsed time: about 10 minutes.  Then I plugged it into power and the network, and … it all worked on the first try.  I've not had to do any tweaking at all.

Awesome job, DD-WRT folks.  Just awesome.  And much appreciated...